


fugue for the high school heroes

by gamblers



Series: senpai is graduating but he still hasn't noticed me yet [5]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball, ダイヤのA | Daiya no A | Ace of Diamond
Genre: Gen, Hemingway Parody, Kobe Bryant's Muse (2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-30 17:34:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13956609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamblers/pseuds/gamblers
Summary: Uplifting jazz music being played at your local sports clinic.





	fugue for the high school heroes

**Author's Note:**

> mirrored to ao3 12.3.2018 // originally written almost exactly three years ago! for the miyukipairings week #1 prompt, "the morning after"

Recovery in terms of its habitual baseline agony following the psychological rehabilitation and any radiant suppression of depression was not the most difficult pill to swallow and Miyuki came to realize this when he got caught staring too much at the boy sitting on the bench across the training room.

It was not an irregular encounter by any means. He did not pay Miyuki much attention at first although this was probably beside the point since their shared environment was not all that ideal for spontaneous small-talk. At present he wore a black tshirt and shorts and no shoes or socks and Miyuki stared at him while he continued to concentrate on the arduous task of picking up one-by-one the contents of a small pile of metal marbles with the first two toes of his left foot and dropping them one-by-one into a plastic cup. The off-rhythm sound of marbles falling into the plastic cup and clicking against each other  _tick tick_ ed across the room.  _Tick. Tick tick._

“You gonna talk to me or what,” he nodded at Miyuki after he finished his first pile and bent over to knock the cup over and spread the marbles back over a towel to repeat the exercise.  _Tick tick. Tick_. “Or maybe stop looking over here, yeah? You’re gonna make this whole process that much more uncomfortable for me.”  _Tick. Tick._

“Sorry,” Miyuki apologized. He wasn’t supposed to be in the room without his trainer as was policy with the clinic but the other boy seemed to have shorted this rule as well. He wondered what either of them were really doing here to begin with. The pain in his shoulder had subsided somewhat in the last few days and he wished that the three-week stipulation and mandatory clinic time hadn’t registered so deeply in Kataoka-sensei’s mind. He was OK now and he wanted to be out on the diamond again. If only to hit some balls. If only to kick Sawamura’s ass a little bit. If only to look at the clouds in the sky. “You in here for a foot injury?”

“Sorta, yeah. Tore my Achilles.”

“Fuck, that’ll hurt.”

“Naw, it’s all good.” The boy barely gritted his teeth when he dropped the last metal marble into the cup. “If anything I feel like I’m fucking Kobe Bryant.”

Miyuki laughed. “You play basketball?”

“You don’t?”

“Nope, baseball for me.”

“You’re tall enough for the court, I wouldn’t have guessed,” the boy said and smiled. “I’m Nijimura, by the way. I just woke up from a bad dream.”

“I’m Miyuki. It’s the morning after for me, too.”

“I would shake your hand, but that involves standing up and hobbling over to you. And I look like a fuckass clinging onto these dumb crutches.”

“No worries,” said Miyuki. He stood up and walked over. They shook hands awkwardly. Nijimura’s grip was surprisingly strong although really if Miyuki thought about it it shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise.

“So you have a shoulder injury,” was the first thing he said to Miyuki after letting go. Presumably he was allowing Miyuki’s baseline agony to speak for itself. “Post-op, though, I take it?”

Miyuki shook his head. He sat down on the training bench next to Nijimura. “I didn’t need surgery.”  _Not yet._  “But yeah, screwed up my rotator cuff pretty hard.”

Nijimura grinned. “Hey, that’s why Kobe’s out  _this_  season. He started for the Lakers with that kind of impediment for years and it never even registered, isn’t that pretty incredible?”

“You really like Kobe, huh.”

“No big deal, just casual respect.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah.”

_Tick tick._

Nijimura breathed out. “It’s just… Kind of hard to do much right now, you know, except by motivating yourself by thinking about GOATs like him. Maybe you’ll understand when you’re sitting here with a surgery up your ass and your high school goals blown out of the water. Ha ha, sorry… Kise was right. I’m just really fucking salty.”

_Tick._

“No, don’t be.” Miyuki swallowed. “I probably understand you more than you think.”


End file.
